In commemoration of City Weekly's 40th anniversary, we are digging into our archives to celebrate. Each week, we FLASHBACK to a story or column from our past in honor of four decades of local alt-journalism. Whether the names and issues are familiar or new, we are grateful to have this unique newspaper to contain them all.
Title: Food Vibrations
Author: Jim Rice
Date: Nov. 18, 1992
For the past two-and-one-half years, a popular cafe located in a busy section of Salt Lake City has been catering to the health-conscious crowd (that deviant, hip segment of society who believes technology peaked with the creation of rice cakes), in an attempt to provide "consciously nourishing" vegetarian cuisine.
The idea behind the Sun Bun Cafe, located at 878 S. 900 E., was to create an experimental food service. While most business owners want employees to be courteous and efficient, the owners of the Sun Bun also wanted their employees to develop consciousness and learn to manage their personal "energy."
The owners of the Sun Bun believed that energy from the employees could be transmitted to the food through thoughts, attitude, and the condition of the employees' bodies. This energy would then be ingested by customers who ate the food, with the potential to either nourish or harm the customer.
But, after an employee meeting on October 11, 1992, the Sun Bun Cafe became an experiment in bad energy, and a graphic example of the limited rights employees in Utah possess to protect themselves from their employers. The Sun Bun Cafe is also a case study highlighting the chasm between discrimination and state law, a chasm that eventually resulted in the closing of the cafe.
Through the course of the employee meeting, the owners of the Sun Bun outlined a new employee policy, which required staff members to stop drinking alcohol, smoking tobacco, eating meat of any kind, or taking illegal drugs, both on and off work-time. The employees were given one month to comply. To the owners of the Sun Bun, the policy was the next step in the experiment. To the staff of 14 employees, it was an example of what happens when healthy people go overboard.
One week after the new policy had been introduced, more than half the staff quit. Another week later, the Sun Bun Cafe laid off the remaining employees and closed its doors.
There are plans to remodel the cafe and reopen under the new name "Park Ivy," Mira Machlis, part-owner of the cafe, said. The new cafe will be staffed with employees who already meet the requirements of the new policy.
"I felt like my rights had been violated," Angela Renner, a former employee, said of the new policy. "I was pretty disturbed and saddened; I think they had a good business going and they blew it for themselves and their employees," she said.
The majority of the Sun Bun staff who quit were not protesting against the new requirements of abstaining from alcohol, tobacco, meat, and illegal drugs as much as they were protesting against what they perceived as unfair infringement upon their personal lives by an employer.
Under Utah law, it is not illegal discrimination for an employer to require their employees to avoid alcohol, tobacco, meat of any kind, or illegal drugs, said Zane Gill, a Salt Lake lawyer who specializes in discrimination cases.
"It's discrimination, but it isn't illegal," Gill said.
But could a policy like the one the Sun Bun is trying to enforce be an invasion of privacy, according to Utah law? Maybe, Gill said.
"This is tantamount to peeping through a person's window at home. What are you going to do? Are you going to spy on these people to see if they're eating a tube steak?" he added.
An employer has the right to restrict the activities of an employee at work, but doesn't have the right to restrict an employee's activities while they are not at work, Gill said. But, he cautions, in Utah, the concept of privacy law still contains a lot of gray areas.
The owners of the Sun Bun Cafe—Barbara Ferre, Mark Ekwall, and Mira and Mark Machlis—developed their unique ideology and employee policies, through consultation with a teacher of consciousness training named Judith Lamb-Lion.
Stout and middle-aged, with gray streaks highlighting long, brown hair pulled tight against her head, Judith Lamb-Lion conveys a strong presence. She is head of the Judith Lamb-Lion Institute, a collection of buildings nestled in the pines, three miles up Big Cottonwood Canyon.
The institute is not a religion, but a non-sectarian educational center that teaches individuals techniques of personal energy management and consciousness training in order to become better in touch with their own, higher, intuitive self. Mastering such techniques will allow a person to live a more balanced, appropriate life, Judith Lamb-Lion explained.
Talking with Judith Lamb-Lion is an exercise in trying to come to grips with the abstract concepts she advocates, which at times seem to make sense, and fighting the lingering feeling that she is serving you up nothing more than a meaningless word salad.
Judith Lamb-Lion does not have a financial investment in the cafe, though the owners of the cafe do have a financial investment in her through their tithes and donations. She is quick to point out, though, that any tithes and donations made to her are completely voluntary.
"Our overall goal is conscious nourishment," Miri Machlis said. "Basically what that is, is the adage of you are what you eat, that you can, by the food that you ingest, pick up energy from the person who has prepared it, and pick up energy from the food itself," she said.
Employees should be conscious and focused while preparing food so they will be in as neutral a state as possible in order to ensure that the real energy, the energy that will nourish, can get to the customer, claims Machlis.
Sun Bun employees were paid to come to work 15 minutes early so they could take time to contemplate and shed the negative energy they might have brought with them.
"I don't know if you've ever been to a restaurant and ended up with an upset stomach and not known why. It's happened to me, and then I've found out the chef was in an angry mood when he prepared the food. The energy of that anger gets into the food and you ingest it," Machlis explained.
Some former Sun Bun employees believe the owners of the cafe went too far with the new employee policy, and were trying to dictate the life-styles of their staff members, on and off work-time.
"I think they are very religious people," Renner said. "But, they are trying to impose their beliefs upon their employees," she said.
"I don't think the policy was fair at all," Kat Slock, a former Sun Bun employee, said. "They didn't require it when they hired us, and they just kind of pulled it out of a hat and said 'do it or leave,'" Slock explained.
Most of the former employees, including Holly Claspill, felt the Sun Bun was a reasonably laid-back and enjoyable place to work, until the new employee policy came out.
"It was a total shock," Claspill said. "We were all just blown over by it. It was like suddenly the owners had become different people," she added.
Employees who quit in protest of the new employee policy were "caught with their energy down," Judith Lamb-Lion said.
The employees were not as committed to participating in the experiment as they should have been, she said. They didn't understand clearly what the owners of the cafe were trying to accomplish, and for this reason, the experiment was unsuccessful, even though the cafe was a financial success.
Soon after the new employee policy was presented to the Sun Bun staff, on October 11, flyers began appearing in numerous places in downtown Salt Lake, calling for a boycott of the cafe when they open under the new name, "Park Ivy." The flyers claim that the cafe discriminates against employees with their new policy.
Judith Lamb-Lion, however, believes the flyers calling for a boycott of the cafe are "wonderful advertising."
There are conflicts of opinion concerning the real reason the owners of the Sun Bun Cafe decided to close the doors and reopen again several weeks hence under a new name. Several employees believe it was the best method the owners could think of to get rid of the existing staff and avoid any charges of discrimination.
"Closing down to remodel was just an excuse," Claspill said.
Machlis claims this isn't true, stating that the owners of the Sun Bun had no choice but to close the doors after so many employees quit in such a short period of time.
"We had been thinking about changing the name of the restaurant for several months, so this was not something new," Machlis explained. "We just decided that since we have to close anyway, let's take this opportunity to give it a good cleaning, change the decor a little bit, change the menu a little bit, and reopen."
Throughout the country, there is a new trend in which individual states are beginning to recognize citizens have a right to privacy, including rights that protect an employee from an employer's intrusions upon their off-work hours, said Jonathan Anderson of the American Civil Liberties Union, National Civil Rights in the Workplace Task Force.
"Over half the states have laws now that provide some form of privacy protection for employees and their off-duty activities," Anderson said.
Utah is not one of those states.
There is a common law-doctrine known as "employment at will," that basically allows employers and employees to terminate the employment relationship at will. This grants sweeping powers to employers, in the absence of state statutes, to develop restrictions against alcohol, tobacco, and meat. "You can be fired at will if you don't comply, and there isn't much you can do about it," Anderson said.
For the time being, many of the former employees of the Sun Bun are still looking for another job and still wondering what went wrong at the little cafe where they enjoyed working.
For the owners of the new Park Ivy Restaurant, they are busy looking for staff members who abstain from tobacco, alcohol, meat, and illegal drugs, and who are willing to practice daily contemplation, eat a vegetarian diet, and live a life-style that can be altered at any moment. They must be subject to the capricious whims of the owners and their decisions to refocus their food service experiment at will.
"What would have been nice is if, instead of letting their energy get out of hand, everybody had been willing to get rid of the energy by sitting down and working this thing out, by sitting down and contemplating...but things just got out of control," Machlis said.
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